Reflecting on “Make It Your Own”

The Case Foundation has just released an evaluation of their innovative “Make It Your Own” program.

The assessment was conducted by Peter Levine, Peter Deitz and Cynthia Gibson. One would be hardpressed to find more knowledgeable, thoughtful folks on civic engagement and social media. The Make It Your Own program was a grant program in 2007 created by the Case Foundation to promote “citizen centered” approaches to local community building. With nearly 5,000 applicants and more than 15,000 voters. It was one of the first efforts, perhaps even the first, to use online voting as a way to crowdsource grantmaking.

The key findings of the evaluation include:

• Two years after the grants were awarded, 80 percent of grantees were still highly engaged with their projects and said that they planned to continue to build on them, indicating that the MIYO was able to provide a solid foundation for this work.
• More than half the MIYO grantees had achieved concrete and significant outcomes at the two-year mark, among them:
  • Replication of the citizen-centered model used in Dunn County, Wisconsin in other communities across the country and Canada (Dunn County Community Visioning).
  • Passage of a charter amendment mandating a citizen participation initiative in New Orleans and that the city may subsidize; there will also be a chapter on citizen participation included in the master plan for the city (Citizen Participation).
  • Public recognition and “100 percent support” from the police department in one New York City community for a project to convene police officers and community citizens; it started slowly but now, some of the project’s most committed participants are NYPD officers (Conversations for Change).
  • Statewide participation in an online community-building project in Vermont, which now has 20,000 users and more than 100,000 postings—accomplishments that were recently featured in Yankee magazine (Front Porch Forum).
  • Presentations to Philadelphia’s Department of Health and Human Services about the approach being used by a youth-led initiative that works with young people in the juvenile justice system to reintegrate into their communities. It has also just created a similar effort focused on young people in the foster care system (Juveniles 4 Justice).
  • The creation of four committees—one of which is now part of local government—and requests to partner with other community organizations in convening residents to identify and take action in addressing environmental problems in several Florida neighborhoods. Recently, Good Magazine and a local college of art and design partnered with one committee to run a campaign to encourage students to design new solutions to the community’s water problems (Summit for Environmental Action).
  • Expansion of an effort to recruit young people from Chicago’s southwest side to address community issues using social media and hip hop music. In its first year, the effort reached 400 community residents who took part in the project’s activities. The first class of young leaders also agreed to assume leadership in raising funds needed to financially sustain the project (Leaders of the New School).
  • Raising money for and building a community pavilion and holding public conversations that led to the establishment of a new organization to “boost up the scale”of green activities in nine towns in Massachusetts. That network persuaded seven town governments in the region to join together to be certified by the State of Massachusetts as a “green community”—a designation that allows the community to compete for a portion of a pool of state money for renewable energy projects (Hands Across North Quabbin).
  • In northwest Washington, hundreds of residents, health and community group leaders, government officials, and businesses held several convenings that led to the creation of an action plan addressing a health issue citizens identified as important: improving supports and service provision for children and youth with special health care needs [CYSHCN]. This has led to a new organization—Taking Action for CYSHCN—which now has four action groups, a development team, and a coordinating council that continue to use the citizen-centered approach in all its efforts (Making Health Our Own).
  • While the stories that stem from the Make It Your Own projects are inspirational, so are the numbers. From the Top 20 projects…
    • More than 800 community meetings were held with over 5,500 participants.
    • More than 1,500 action projects took place with more than 3,300 participants.
    • Nearly 20,000 individuals were engaged in some aspect of the projects.
    • Over 600 collaborative partners were involved.
  • Within two years of grant awards,three projects had ended or been forced to close, due largely to the inability of the original leaders to continue serving in that capacity. Also, the Foundation was unable to locate one of the Top 20 projects.
• Other challenges faced by MIYO grantees at the end of two years were county and local budget cuts (which grantees also viewed as opportunities to spur support for their efforts in the community); keeping people interested in the projects; language barriers; and funding (although this was not one that precluded them from moving forward).
• At the end of the one-year grant period, 13 out of 20 grantees (65%) considered themselves at an “advanced” level of citizen-centered work, compared to 11 grantees (or 55%) at the interim stage.
• The grant award enabled winners to conduct public meetings which otherwise may have not occurred. Winning a MIYO award allowed organizations to conduct public meetings that would otherwise have been too expensive or difficult. These meetings attracted diverse groups of people in communities where having opportunities to connect with fellow residents were relatively rare. Most grantees indicated that the meetings were quite productive, suggesting they have the potential to serve as a foundation for ongoing work in these communities after the grant period ends.
• People who participated in MIYO projects believed this participation would increase their civic engagement in the future. MIYO winners were more likely to report that the people they had recruited to participate in their community-based projects said this participation had increased their interest in “doing more” for their communities, now and in the future.
• Even though only 20 projects received funding, a majority of the 4,641 MIYO applicants moved their projects forward. Of those, 28 percent started what was proposed , eight (8) percent completed what was proposed, and 19 percent went beyond what was proposed. Only 18 percent of all applicants reported that they hadn’t done anything.
• Applicants generally liked the grant process, especially learning about the concept and having the chance to describe what they planned to do in that area. Among applicants, the highest-rated aspects of the grant program were learning more about the citizen-centered engagement approach and being given the opportunity to flesh out their projects in more detail via the online application form. Nearly half the applicants (46%) said that what they’d heard and learned about the citizen-centered process was very helpful to the work they did or are doing on their projects. For some of these applicants, the concept was completely new; for others, it “filled gaps” in their knowledge and was “exciting because it completely fits” with what they were already doing.
• The overall applicant pool was not especially strong in terms of its reflection of “citizen-centered” efforts as defined by Citizens at the Center. Despite the Foundation’s efforts to include definitions of this concept in all its materials—including grant guidelines, website announcements, and the applications themselves—applicants tended to interpret the phrase as synonymous with community service, volunteering, and/or “effective or fair delivery of services to citizens,” rather than with community problem-solving that involves citizens.
• The MIYO winners, however, did reflect the citizen-centered concept, suggesting that using a combination of both experts and external reviewers at the final stages of the effort to score and assess proposals was effective in surfacing projects that best illustrated the concept.

Go and read the full report, it’s great stuff.

Voting For Causes and Candidates Online and Overseas

Voting, in some form or another, is on the minds and screens of Americans everywhere during this election year. As everyone knows it’s American Idol season and millions of Americans are voting by phone and text messaging for their favorites. However, in spite of the great interest in and high turnout for the presidential primaries on the Democratic side, the voting system — the mechanics that should allow for an easy and secure one-person-one-vote process, a system that the government has invested $4 billion since the debacle in 2000 — continues to be broken. Early registration deadlines and expensive machinery that continues to freeze, lose votes, and confound voters doesn’t work well. And in the case of Michigan and Florida, a political party is on the road to intentionally disenfranchising it’s own voters, a situation complicated by the politics of the death match for delegates between Senators Obama and Clinton, but also, as reported here, the Herculean logistics and costs associated with revoting. At the same time, quietly and efficiently, a quiet revolution in voting is happening in unexpected places.

One of the most exciting efforts is the unfolding Make It Your Own Awards sponsored by The Case Foundation. In 2006, The Case Foundation commissioned a paper by Cynthia Gibson entitled Citizens at the Center. The premise of the paper, which like all good ideas is very simple in retrospect, is that solutions for community problems need to come from local citizens who are supported by local advocacy or service organizations. Based on this idea, The Case Foundation created a grant initiative that would be completely transparent and democratic, two words rarely associated with philanthropy in the past. Here’s how Cynthia Gibson describes the Make it Your Own Initiative, “What we were trying to do through Make It Your Own Awards is to make operational two notions. The first, to show what citizen-centered efforts, which are very difficult to define but are taking place all across the country, really look like. The second, to show how philanthropy, which has traditionally operated as a black box, can actually involve “real people”, the ones who derive significant tax benefit, in their efforts.”

Community-based groups submitted online applications aiming to be one of the four $25,000 winners. More than four times the number of applications than the foundation expected were received, 4,641 to be exact. Using an American Idol-like winnowing process, the foundation enlisted 100 experts to narrow the number of applicants to 20 finalists. These finalists each received $10,000. And now the fun part, the public voting (you can vote here:
http://miyo.casefoundation.org/vote/
) begins and lasts until April 22^nd.

Created by HZ Design, this election site is pleasing visually and very easy to use. With a nod to the wisdom of the crowds, the public will “elect” four winners. Each voter will use a unique email address. To safeguard against skewed results, and a flat out popularity contest, the site rotates the position of the finalists on the screen. The votes will be tallied independently by an outside firm, Election America. As Rich D’Amato of the Case Foundation said, “It’s fun and not too difficult, but most of all it’s involving people in meaningful ways in selecting the winners.”

The Make It Your Own Awards are more than a singular event, and more than a charitable one too. They are a harbinger of voting in this country. It’s easy to imagine voting portals like this one that have links to additional information on the people running for election or the ballot initiatives. We already have a wonderful example of online voting during this presidential primary season.

Democrats Abroad, a division of the Democratic National Committee, organized online voting for registered members of the Democratic Party as part of the Super Tuesday primaries. Voters also had the option of voting by fax and mail and in person in some places. My friend Jim, a Democrat living abroad, emailed me, “I had to register with “Democrats Abroad” before they would let me vote. It was all done by email, and I really wasn’t too worried about security.”

On February 21^st, Democrats Abroad released the results of the first global primary for a presidential election. A little more than 23,000 votes were cast overseas and about half of those votes were made online. For instance, of the 662 votes in Japan, 435 were cast online, in Australia 414 votes were cast, 273 were online. This pattern was repeated in every region around the globe. After he voted, Jim emailed me again, “I logged in to the site with a id number and password that had been emailed me. I was required to submit a us address and agree to be a good democrat.” He continued, “In the end I could print a copy for my records, which I didn’t, but I’m not so worried that my vote won’t be counted this particular time.”

If the DNC and state party officials were to really consider a revote in Florida and Michigan , voting online is a safe and tested method that can inexpensively scale elections and allow voters to cast ballots wherever they are and whenever they like during the voting period. It’s not new or risky or futuristic, if you look carefully it is happening right now, safely and successfully. Given these examples and the proclivity of people, particularly young people, to use their everyday connecting tools to cast ballots, whether it is for their favorite causes, presidential candidates or the male actor with the cutest eyes, the tools are in place to scale online voting inexpensively and securely.

The complaints and concerns about online voting are as of-repeated as they are untrue. What about fraud, say the naysayers. This red herring pops up over and again and is repeatedly proven not to exist at any meaningful level (for an excellent study on the myth of voter fraud, click here to read, “Securing the Vote: An Analysis of Election Fraud” by David Callahan and Lorraine Minnette) why would online voting promote fraud any more than the nonexistent fraud that currently exists? In the case of Democrats Abroad, once a voter was identified as registered, they were sent a unique identifying number and passcode. The Case Foundation is appealing to the better nature of voters by using email addresses as identifiers – and if voters choose to use more than one email address we know from other voting efforts that it will be balanced out by the rest of the crowd who understand the spirit of the effort. But what about hackers? say the nabobs. Almost 18,000 votes disappeared from a Florida Congressional election in 2006 – almost 5 percent of the vote total in that race (why is it always Florida?) Election machines were left unsecured and unattended overnight in a very close election in Maryland’s 4^th District in 2006. All of these problems stem from local tampering, unsecured and unreliable machinery (could there be a better analogy for this Bush Administration than $4 billion spent on new election machinery since 2000 and the results are that voters are less confident of voting outcomes!).

Oh, wait, don’t forget the fact that not everyone has online access, say the curmudgeons. Well, actually most Americans do have access (see Pew study here) and those who don’t in their homes do at work or at public access points like their public library. An older person said to me the other day, “I do my banking online and that’s safe, why shouldn’t I vote online?” I am not suggesting that voting only happen online (and those without online access at home can go to a library or vote at work also), we should keep mail-in voting as an alternative. Together the system will be much less expensive than the current broken system.

The solution is happening right now at the Case Foundation’s website, overseas with Democratic voters and the myriad other online voting efforts that are seamless, and intuitive for so many people. Online voting offers a clear distinction and alternative to the antiquated rules and troublesome and troubling mechanics of on land voting, a system determined to keep as many people out as in. How much more wasted money on machines that don’t work do we have endure until the logical answer, that one sitting right there in front of us, is adopted? Whether naysayers, curmudgeons or skeptics like it or not, online voting will be the 21^st century version of the increasing popular absentee ballots and mail-in voting.